5th March, 2004: Keith Warmington Show, BBC Bristol

Thank you, it's a  pleasure to be here.

Well there probably is. What kind of music were you actually playing-
Synaesthesia. that's the word I was thinking of. Ah, bingo! Synaesthesia!
Well that's a good word. What sort of music were you playing then?
Well latterly it was a kind of hybrid of punky funk and reggae, but I was leaning towards bebop - that's the kind of stuff I was writing while playing music.
What was your instrument?
Guitar. Stratocaster.
Stratocaster. A triumph of design, I always think.
Yeah. Simple but very effective.
And beautiful as well. So was there at any time a kind of pull between, that you might have gone down the music or the art road or not?
Well it was pretty much fifty-fifty, each way for a long time. I may still have been a musician if I hadn't had a brain haemorrhage when I was thirty something, which left me unable to play the guitar as I had previously, forced me back to the True Path, as a painter. Actually,just as well, because I'm a much better painter than I ever was a musician.
Fair enough! But did having a huge illness like that in your thirties, does that change your outlook on life?
Well certainly it does. It leaves me with a permanent short-circuit in my head which at times is quite useful for being an artist. Not for being a bus driver, but if you want to be an artist…

So if we see you behind the wheel we'll catch the next one.
Keep to the inside of the pavement!
Okay! Tell me a little about your art and where that came from. Were you always good at it?
Well, eh, I decided when I was about nine years old that what I wanted to be was an artist. I remember telling my parents that I was going to be an artist, and they said "Oh, that's fine, that's good", and I had a feeling of disappointment because I was used to reading stories about little boys having to fight their parents to do what they wanted to do. And that's where it began. It was always the most natural thing in the world for me to draw and paint.
So you went off to art college, and all that stuff-
Glasgow, in the years when they still taught you how to draw and paint in the classical manner, and we had to draw, and paint, plaster casts for months before they would let us touch real people.
Really?
So that kind of grounding stays with you for life.
So is that really important to become a good artist? I was just thinking of that because a lot of famous abstract artists started out as figurative painters and they went through those grounding rules, really.
Yes. It's just like learning to play a musical instrument. If you don't know how to get a tune out of a trumpet, there's not much else you can do with it. You have to learn how to play your horn before you can let loose and do whatever the hell you want.
Hm. Okay, as I said, my guest chooses their bronze, silver and gold records tonight. Unfortunately, your bronze medal was at home…
Ha ha ha, yes…
In the CD player -
That was to have been  the Stan Tracey suite, 'Under Milk Wood', which I remember was the third LP I ever bought. The first one I bought was the Beatles.
Which Beatles album was that?
The first one.
The very first one?
Yes. And a year or two later I bought the Stan Tracey album, which was the jazz record of the year, and it stays with me. That's the essence of bebop, which is something I got into my blood - when I was quite young.
So how old would you have been when you bought the Stan Tracey album then?
Aaah - fifteen.
That's young isn't it. Getting the Beatles first album, and a year later the Stan Tracey album.

Ha ha ha!
Some people of course never quite make the jump, and some of course go back to the trains.

That's right, it's changed quite a lot, peoples' attitude to the RWA, as a whole- the fact that you can go in any day, any time, and it's always open to the public. They have a little coffee stall there as well. It's all very civilised, user friendly. Before, quite often between major shows it would be closed, but now as I say, it's always open.
Yes there was a big refurb and it's a lovely building isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. Extremely posh.
So you got a new exhibition of paintings and of prints. Let's talk about the way you go about your work, for a bit Cliff,  because you go around taking photographs, of anybody-
That's right. My favourite way of working is usually at the height of the summer, just stroll into the crowd and shoot around fairly indiscriminately. I quite often find that some of my best paintings have been based on something that was happening in the background, something I never noticed at the time.
How did you arrive at that as  way of working, then?

So you don't look for a certain sort of face, a certain sort of setting, or…
I kind of work in that way sometimes. I see a face that moves me in some way. It's more a combination of the face and the effects of the light. And the colour. All those things together.
So you decide what you like and you sit down and start working on it, start painting.

What artists have you enjoyed, which one perhaps interest you in any way at all?

They're bold and quite brightly coloured aren't they?
They are indeed, yes.
And they've got a lot of life in them, and emotion, if you know what I mean.
Yes, I'm pretty strong on the colour. Colour's another mode of expression. You can express emotions through colour.
And your stuff's up for three weeks. All of your stuff's for sale, because that's the point of being an artist: you paint it and you sell it. You've got prints as well.
That's right. A brand new a selection of lithographs and screen prints

Yes they gave me a good hand with printing the catalogue.

That's true, you don't often have a chance to stand back and have an over-view of what you've been up to, until you have a show.
Good feeling?
Good for the ego, as well, needless to say.
Absolutely. Well Cliff we've come to your last record, which is Charles Trenet, 'La Mer'. I love it; why do you like it?
That's probably as much in my bones as much as bebop is. When I was a little boy, still in short trousers, that was in the Hit Parade. It was on the radio all the time.
It takes you back to those times…
Somebody on Radio Three said, "If nostalgia has a sound, this is what it sounds like."